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As a small business owner getting ready to build your first website or redesign your existing one, you might wonder what you should be considering in terms of making your web design search engine friendly. There are lots of things to take into account, but here are the five key things that you should know about SEO friendly web design and how it can benefit your visitors, too! 1. It Needs to be Responsive For small businesses, especially local ones, having great rankings in mobile search is incredibly important. Why? For starters, 50% of consumers who perform a local search on mobile devices visit a store within a day of their search. What’s even more exciting is that 78% of mobile searches for local business lead to offline purchases. If you want to do well in mobile search results, you will want to have a mobile-friendly design. Responsive design is the easiest to aim for because it offers a similar user experience to desktop visitors, tablet visitors, and smart phone visitors. … [Read more...] about 5 Things to Know About #SEO Friendly Web Design

As digital marketers, we often become neurotically focused on how we market our products and services. We tend to overlook what we’re marketing, how the consumer or prospective client perceives our brand and the overall experience we provide them. According to researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, it takes just two tenths of a second for a website visitor to form a first impression of your company. And what about after that initial fraction of a second? How seamlessly does your conversion funnel guide someone through the sales process? How professional is your sales team? How truly valuable is your product in the eyes of your target audience? In other words, how honest is the perception you are creating? These are important questions to answer, and it would take nothing short of a miracle to develop, launch, and maintain a successful digital advertising campaign without assiduously attending to every detail of your digital experience. Before I take on … [Read more...] about Are You Paying Attention to All PPC Details?

When the long-awaited DisavowTool from Google was announced finally at the PubCon Las Vegas, search professionals around the globe breathed a sigh of relief. There is a way now with which they can deal with the penalties laid on them by the Penguin Update due to ‘un-natural links’. They can now ‘disavow’ these links and get their site back in Google’s good books. If you want to use this tool, you will have to identify your bad links first and then work on pruning them. Once you submit the list of links you have to disavow, you will be given a choice of comments or links or domains to block. Of these options you must choose accordingly. But remember that you must use the tool only on the links which you haven’t been able to remove manually. Google itself has stressed that the tool is a last resort after you have exhausted all manual efforts to get bad links removed. Because once Google disavows them, you may even lose the good links and eventually … [Read more...] about A How to Guide on Identifying Bad Links and Pruning Them Using Google’s Disavow Tool

It’s time for my monthly column again, which means it’s time for me to jump back up on my soapbox. If you’ve read any of my past articles here in the Local section of Search Engine Land, you know that my posts typically fall into two camps: helpful tips for marketers, or soapbox rants with helpful tips thrown in. This month, it’s the latter of the two. In fact, we might need to come up with a permanent moniker for my posts here. This month, on Greg’s Soapbox… The biggest problem with local SEO I work with car dealers all over the US on a daily basis, and since I speak at a ton of SEO and marketing conferences, I get to chat with business owners and marketers literally all over the world. Regardless of the vertical, the most common truth in local SEO is that the majority of sites out there have flat-out awful content. Yes, I’m probably talking about your site. I talk to people all the time who say that their content is awesome, but I find … [Read more...] about The secret to writing awesome local content

Maybe I should have used an image of me jumping on a soapbox, because I’m about to preach. Spring conference season is in full swing, and I’ve had my mind blown several times already — not from amazing presentations (although there were several), but from conversations with business owners and newbies in the marketing world. Case in point: At an automotive conference, I talked to a dealer who had deleted his dealership’s Facebook and Twitter accounts on the advice of his SEO provider. He said they told him it wasn’t good for him to have an open forum where customers could say whatever they wanted about his business. I pointed out that the customers would still be out there, even if his dealership wasn’t… and he agreed! He said he thought that sounded weird, but he shrugged and figured his SEO guy knew what he was doing. I’ve talked to far too many business owners this spring who feel like they’re getting fleeced by their SEO … [Read more...] about 10 tips for avoiding shady SEO providers